I am reconfirmed in what I wrote when
reviewing Major Barbara at
the Orange Tree late in 2006, that it may well be Bernard Shaw’s
masterpiece. We may dream of an age far ahead when the mordant
observations of this 1905 drama cease to be perennially topical, but we
are probably as deluded as most of the play’s characters. Shaw’s own
argumentative surrogate here is Andrew Undershaft, an unrepentant arms
millionaire who (appropriately) explodes both the antiquated patrician
delusions of his wife and son and also the theistical idealism of his
daughter, whose rank in the Salvation Army gives the play its title.
Undershaft in effect buys Barbara’s God from her by writing a huge
cheque for the Sallies which demonstrates that their virtuous work
cannot be afforded without funding from supposedly wicked endeavours.
Later, he entices her eccentrically cerebral fiance Adolphus into
becoming his successor at the cannon factory, amid its model town with
all material and social facilities, with the challenge “Dare you make
war on war?”

Shaw’s point is that simple morality cannot cope with such
complexities, and in the end ameliorating people’s lot in this world
must come first, by whatever means. When Undershaft lists his own seven
deadly sins, the serious ones chime remarkably with Beveridge’s five
great evils which the welfare state was intended to slay. As for his
unashamed exercise of power, his speech beginning “I am the government of your
country!” is as blistering as anything David Hare and Howard Brenton
wrote for their ogre of a press baron in Pravda 80 years later.

This speech is also one of the moments when Simon Russell Beale’s
performance as Undershaft truly catches fire. We treat it almost as a
matter of course now that Beale is simply the finest actor currently on
our stage: he can seemingly get right inside every line of every
character he plays. And what he reveals here is that, not so
surprisingly, Andrew Undershaft is mostly an animated argument rather
than a person. Beale sounds most comprehensively human on short,
throwaway lines, as when “Dolly”’s faux-naïf
question over his prospective salary, “Is three-fifths less than a
half, or more?” is met by Beale with a perfectly timed pause and the
single word “More” in which he conveys semi-incredulity, remonstration
and even enjoyment at being twitted so.

At other times pauses, Beale’s included, are almost the death of
Nicholas Hytner’s production. Clare Higgins is admirably
un-battleaxe-y, almost absent-minded in her peremptoriness as Lady
Britomart Undershaft (a name which nearly corpsed her and Beale on
opening night) and John Heffernan properly ineffectual as son Stephen,
but two such performances in a long opening duologue get things off to
barely any start at all. Hayley Atwell has a fervent glitter in her eye
as Barbara, but when she is standing up either to her father or the
low-lifes in her Salvationist shelter, the effort begins to show. Paul
Ready’s Adolphus gently parodies his own otherworldliness; he is the
sort of man who could indeed be swayed by the persuasions of the man he
calls “the Prince of Darkness” in the obligatorily debate-intense final
act. There is a modest coup de
théâtre in Tom Pye’s design (given the lesser
budgets of the Travelex £10 season, of which this is 2008’s first
production), when the Undershafts’ drawing-room is dismantled and
dozens of artillery shells flown in to become the arms factory. But
Hytner’s production feels constantly as if it is reaching out to fill
the Olivier space when, if it put on more of a turn of speed, it could
simply pull us along with it.